Israel Katorza

Israel Katorza was born in Nanterre in 1968 and arrived in Israel as a small child. His road to the stage ran through the Israeli Air Force, where he trained and served as an electronics technician, and his earliest stand-up sets were played for fellow soldiers at the Ramon air base. After his discharge he studied acting, and in the early 1990s radio listeners knew him as Tzuga, a character he voiced on a comedy programme.

The breakthrough came in 1993, when he did stand-up on Dudu Topaz's weekend show on Channel One. From there he developed the kind of evening that made his name: a long solo show that mixes sketches with talk to the audience and draws on marriage, domestic routine and the small frictions of Israeli daily life. He is counted among the most successful stand-up comedians in the country, and he became a regular panelist on the Channel 2 late-night comedy show Mo'adon Laila (Night Club).

Television gave him room beyond the stand-up stage. In 2013 he created and starred in the Channel 10 comedy series Israel, whose format was sold to the American network ABC, and he has hosted and acted in several series for the Children's Channel. His film roles include Turn Left at the End of the World (2004), Amos Gitai's Disengagement (2007) and The Last Band in Lebanon (2016), and he has a long list of theatre parts and Hebrew voice roles in animated films.